Commando credits luck in foiling Hitler’s nuclear ambitions

Exploits kept nukes away from Hitler

New York Times

November 20, 2015

ALESUND, Norway — For a man who saved the world, or at least helped ensure that Adolf Hitler never got hold of a nuclear bomb, Joachim Ronneberg has a surprisingly unheroic view of the forces that shape history.

“There were so many things that were just luck and chance,” Ronneberg, 96, said of his 1943 sabotage mission that blew up a Norwegian plant vital to Nazi Germany’s nuclear program. “There was no plan. We were just hoping for the best.”

The leader and only living member of a World War II commando team that destroyed the Nazis’ only source of heavy water, a rare fluid needed to produce nuclear weapons, Ronneberg has had his exploits celebrated in a 1965 blockbuster movie, “The Heroes of Telemark,” been showered with military medals and been honored, belatedly, with a statue and museum display in his hometown here on Norway’s west coast.

M.R.D. Foot, the official historian of Britain’s wartime sabotage and intelligence service, which organized Ronneberg’s mission, described the raid on the Norsk Hydro plant as a “coup” that “changed the course of the war.”

As the mission was underway, Ronneberg realized that the handsaw that British planners had intended for use on a padlock on the plant’s side gate would have taken too much time, made too much noise and alerted Nazi guards. The success of the mission “was mostly luck, definitely,” he said.

After using heavy-duty metal cutters he bought by happenstance to break a lock on the plant’s side gate and getting inside a hall containing the heavy water production, Ronneberg planted two strings of explosive charges provided by British intelligence. He said he decided at the last minute to cut fuses designed to burn for two minutes so they lasted only 30 seconds. This, he said, gave his men just enough time to get out safely but made sure that they would still be close enough “to hear the bang” and know “we had done our job.”

It took years before Ronneberg came to understand the exact purpose and importance of the job. He said all the British told him before dropping him onto a snow-covered Norwegian mountain was that a row of pipes at the plant needed to be destroyed.

He added that he knew nothing at the time about nuclear physics, heavy water or the race to build a nuclear bomb. He knew Britain had lost more than 35 men in a disastrous 1942 attempt to sabotage the plant, but he had no idea why the British were so intent on disabling a remote mountain facility whose only product as far as he knew was fertilizer.

“The first time I heard about atom bombs and heavy water was after the Americans dropped the bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki” in 1945, he said. “Then we started to understand our raid and why.” And that, had it failed, London could have ended up “looking like Hiroshima.” This belated realization of the huge stakes at play “was a tremendous satisfaction.”